Analysts sympathetic to Kwara State government may have some points in describing the administration of Abdulfatah Ahmed, which took over from that of Bukola Saraki’s as government of continuity.

Ahmed was Commissioner for Finance and later Planning and Economic Development for seven and a half years during which he was deeply involved in the formulation of policies and programmes of the Saraki’s administration. It was apparently on that backdrop that even the governor described his administration as government of continuity, that is, to continue execution of policies and programmes of the Saraki administration.

This, to a great extent, has been the trust of the policy of the Ahmed’s administration in the last one year as it focused on building on the foundation laid by its predecessor in many sectors.

In the health sector, mainly what the administration has been able to do is embarking on renovation of five General Hospitals in the state to increase access of the people to secondary healthcare services.

The Saraki administration concentrated mainly on primary healthcare with a plan that from there the secondary sector would be taken care of.

The five General Hospitals that Ahmed’s administration is giving renovation are those of Ilorin, Offa, Omu-Aran, Oke-Ode, and Kaiama towns, which cut across the three senatorial districts of the state. About N200m has been earmarked for the project as the government promises to equip the hospitals with modern facilities.

The government promised to renovate the remaining nine General Hospitals in the state in line with its plan is to make all the hospitals more functional and beneficial to the people.

The administration seems to adopt a somewhat radical approach in building on the foundation laid by its predecessor in the education sector. Essentially, its cardinal focus is on how students could acquire skills with which they could be self-employed and be job creators on graduation from school.

In pursuing this goal, the government has changed the state Ministry of Education, Science and Technology to Ministry of Education and Human Capital Development and has come up with a new curriculum that entails human capital development programmes for schools.

It has also embarked on rehabilitation of existing technical colleges in the state and plans to establish more of such colleges. It has also worked out arrangements for training of artisans to acquaint them with the modern ways by which they could do their business more profitably.

The government, while sustaining the teacher quality improvement programme of its predecessor has also saddled the teachers with more responsibilities to ensure that their pupils are more serious with their academic programmes.

It made Principals and head teachers responsible for performances of their respective schools and hinged promotion of teachers on performance of their students in the subjects.

The administration continued with the school renovation projects of its predecessor as it renovated 200 classrooms in 58 schools across the 16 local government areas of the state and carried out Phase I rehabilitation project of the state School for Special Needs.

It also recently improved upon the free education programme in the state as it made free the cost of education at the secondary school level as it had been from primary to junior secondary while reducing tuition fee of the state owned university, KWASU, by about 30 per cent.

At the water sector the government introduced a project of access to portable water in every 500 metres distance in all parts of the state.

The government has also sunk a number of boreholes in some rural areas of the state. The measure however appears to still be far from achieving the set goal on 500 metres as many communities in the state seem to still have problem with access to portable water.

One of the first noticeable projects of the administration when it came on board last year was the rehabilitation of roads in the state capital. The government, thus, launched a programme it code-named ‘operation no potholes’ under which it rehabilitated many of the portions of the roads with potholes.

The government has also awarded contracts for rehabilitation of some of the rural and access roads in the state in line with its pledge to facilitate transportation of farm produce to markets, and thereby encourage more people to take to farming.

However some of the road projects the administration inherited from its predecessor are yet to be completed. One of these is the dualisation of Asa Dam/Offa-Garage road in Ilorin, which is merely improved from the state the last administration left it.

The government launched a N500 million micro-credit scheme as a way of executing its Poverty Alleviation Programme (PAP). It in fact, had recently released N250 million for implementation of the scheme. It is doing this with involvement of micro-finance banks from where the beneficiaries would, in cooperatives groups, obtain the loan and refund with just five per cent interest.

In the agriculture sector the government has signed a number of Memorandum of Understandings with foreign partners towards making agriculture more profitable in the state. It said it has a plan of making the state a hub of agriculture where raw materials from the farm such as cassava and some other crops would be processed into finished products instead of exporting the raw materials abroad.

The government in the last one-year has also introduced a programme to reduce unemployment rate in the state. The programme tagged ‘Kwara Bridge Employment Scheme’ is designed to offer unemployed youths casual employment first with plan to later make them secure full employment.

Two thousand youths, drawn from all the local government areas of the state, have been employed under the scheme. The government said it has expended N140 million on the monthly stipends of the people in the last seven months of their employment.

It also disclosed that 50 per cent of the youths would in the next couple of days be offered full employment while the others will enjoy same benefit later. The government, which has under the scheme made a data capture of unemployed youths in the state, assured to make further phases of the employment.

However, the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) in the state alleged that the programme is not devoid of partisan politics, saying that none of its members was offered an employment. It in fact, claimed that only members of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) or their supporters were engaged in the scheme.

But the Commissioner for Information and Communication, Tunji Moronfoye, has put a lie to the claim, insisting that people were employed from Offa local government area, which is an ACN dominated area.

ACN has also alleged that the government in the last one-year made no meaningful impact on the welfare of the people as well as the socio-economic development of the state. The party in a statement signed by its chairman, Kayode Olawepo, alleged that the government was only making noise of achievements that are yet to be seen or felt.

It stated, "This administration has received close to N30 billion in federal allocations in just one year, perhaps the highest received by any administration in Kwara State within such a short period of time, but one cannot really pinpoint what concrete things it has done with it. They claim to be leading an agrarian revolution, but beyond the amateurish mending of potholes in the state capital, there is hardly any green road being constructed to open up the entire state for investment in the sector.

"In its bid to attract investment to the agric sector, the administration forgets that a state totally lacking in social infrastructure is a non-starter. So much noise has been made about attracting N70 billion investment in rice production, when in reality no such investment has been made. Also, no satisfactory response has been given to the fact that Vasolar Consortium is non-existent. And assuming without conceding that it exists, what is its track record in rice production to justify the decision of the state government to questionably commit £7 million (N1.46billion) and 20,000 hectares of land to the project?

"If you check through the last one year, therefore, this administration has only performed wonderfully well in the area of noise making, while Kwarans - civil servants, peasants, farmers and ordinary folks on the streets - continue to groan under a directionless governance. The Labour’s listing, on May Day, of Kwara as one of the states not complying with the National Minimum Wage Law has said enough about our earlier comments on the matter.

"Our advice to the people of Kwara State is to continue to speak up against the many anomalies going on in the state, because only in doing so can the outside world know the true state of things, as against all the propaganda and outright lies in the media."

However in the opinion of the Congress of Nigeria Political Parties (CNPP) in the state the administration has touched the lives of the people of the state in many respects by executing numerous projects in the socio-economic sectors.

The CNPP in a statement signed by his chairman, Zakari Mohammed, and secretary, Bamidele Omotosho, said, "The administration of Alhaji Abdulfatah Ahmed has achieved so much in the last one year. His achievements cut across the various sectors as education, health, agriculture, water supply, road construction, employment generation, electrification, commerce and industry, sports, rural development, security to mention but a few."

The party commended the government for its projects under each sector, which it highlighted to include "renovation of more than 150 schools, renovation of general hospital, acquiring of hectres of land for planting of rice and cassava and other crops to ensure food security in the state, massive rehabilitation of rural roads, creation of more than 2,000 jobs for the youths, purchase of many transformers to boost electricity supply to the people and sinking of 72 boreholes to make portable water more available to the people."